The pace at which species disappear is picking up as
temperatures rise, and things are looking especially troubling in the tropics

Climate change is accelerating species loss on Earth, and by the end of this
century, as many as one in six species could be at risk of extinction. But
while these effects are being seen around the world, the threat is much higher
in certain sensitive regions, according to two new comprehensive studies.

The planet is experiencing a new wave of die-offs driven by factors such as
habitat loss, the introduction of exotic invaders and rapid changes to our
climate. Some people have called the phenomenon
the sixth mass extinction,
on par with the catastrophic demise of the large dinosaurs 65 million years
ago. To try and combat the declines, scientists have been racing to make
predictions about which species are most likely to go extinct, along with when
and where it will happen, sometimes with widely varying results.

“Depending on which study you look at, you can come away with a rosy or gloomy
view of climate change extinctions,” notes Mark Urban of the University of
Connecticut. “That’s because each study focuses on different species [and]
regions of the world and makes different assumptions about climate change and
species’ responses.”

In one of the two new studies published today in Science, Urban compensated
for all those differences by combining 131 previously published studies into
one big prediction. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, he
calculates, 16 percent of species will be threatened with extinction due to
climate change by the end of the century.

“Perhaps most surprising is that extinction risk does not just increase with
temperature rise, but accelerates, curving upward as the Earth warms,” Urban
says. If greenhouse gases were capped and temperatures rose a couple degrees
less, then the extinction threat would be nearly halved, he found.

Urban’s analysis focused on major land areas (minus Antarctica) and found that
the risk of die-offs was not equal around the world. South America, Australia
and New Zealand will experience the most extinctions, probably because these
regions have many species that are endemic and found nowhere else in the
world, and they rely on habitats that are not found anywhere else.

Ocean areas predicted to be at high risk of extinction
(red) are overlaid with areas most impacted by humans (black outline) and
regions experiencing a high rate of climate change (crosshatch). (Finnegan et
al, Science.)

In the second study, Seth Finnegan of the University of California, Berkeley
and colleagues drew from the fossil record to make predictions about modern
extinction risk in the world’s coastal areas.

“Extinction is a process that often plays out on very long
timescales—thousands of years or more. But our direct observations of modern
species span, in even the best cases, only a few hundred years,” notes
Finnegan. “Fossils allow us to examine the entire histories of different
groups, from their first appearance until their final extinction.”

Finnegan’s group used the fossil histories of six groups of marine
animals—bivalves, gastropods, sea urchins, sharks, mammals and stony corals—to
determine which kinds of animals were inherently more likely to disappear, or
the intrinsic risk of extinction. Similar groups of species tend to have
similar patterns of extinction, Finnegan notes, which makes fossil studies
such as this one possible. They team also analyzed the geographic locations
where such extinctions were more likely to occur.

The researchers then overlaid their map of intrinsic extinctions with data on
today's human impacts and climate change to determine probable hotspots of
species loss. They found that coastal species will be especially at risk near
the tropics, including the Indo-Pacific, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

“The implications of these broad-scale patterns for the future of coastal
marine ecosystems will depend on how intrinsic risk and current threats
interact to determine future extinction risk,” the researchers note. In some
places, such as the North Atlantic, “anthropogenic impacts may dwarf intrinsic
risk effects and leave a distinctly human fingerprint on future extinctions.”

(Some of the species at risk,
American pika, tufted pika, green sea turtle and polar bear.)

The best way to prevent
their loss at that of many or our own kind is
to move the heat of global warming to the only place on the planet capable of
receiving that much heat to limited effect.